Yeltsin Becomes the Focus of Russian Opposition in Coup

MOSCOW, AUG. 19 -- Within hours of learning that Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had
been stripped of power in a military-backed coup, tens of thousands of
Muscovites gathered all around the capital to argue and plead with the
army troops and tank crews who had seized control of the city just after
dawn today.

By nightfall, dozens of army tanks had defected to join protesters
gathered outside the Russian Federation parliament building, where the
largest and most organized demonstration against the takeover took
place. The tanks formed a defensive perimeter around the building,
joining hundreds of protesters gathered to defend the building against a
feared army assault and to rally around Russian President Boris Yeltsin,
the Soviet Union's most popular politician and its most outspoken
reformist.

"The reactionaries will not achieve their goals; the army will not go
against the people," shouted Yeltsin, who had scrambled atop a tank
parked outside the parliament building to address his supporters. "You
are right, Boris Nikolaevich," the crowd chanted in reply. "We will
defend democracy."

{The crowds surrounding the Russian parliament building dwindled to a
few thousand overnight, but their spirits were boosted Tuesday morning
by a defensive ring of about 30 tanks, armored cars and other military
vehicles loyal to Yeltsin. As dawn broke, three tanks flying the
pre-revolutionary Russian red, white and blue flag blocked off the
western approach to Moscow's downtown Kutuzovksy Prospekt. A column of
tanks loyal to the Emergency Committee was reported to have turned back.

{"We will defend the people," said a major from the Tamanski division
stationed outside Moscow. "There is no Soviet Union for us to defend
anymore."}

At street corners and public squares, protesters clambered onto
tanks, sometimes placing flowers in the massive gun barrels or jamming
metal spokes into the treads.

In Manezh Square at the gates of the Kremlin, military vehicles were
spattered with eggs, as a crowd of several thousand Muscovites chanted,
"Free Russia!" and "Down with Yazov!" a reference to Soviet Defense
Minister Dmitri Yazov, a member of the committee of Communist
hard-liners that announced it had ousted Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev.

Journalists and other witnesses around the city reported similar
scenes of popular rage. "Why tanks?" screamed one gray-haired woman as a
column of armored vehicles passed by. "Tanks against whom? Boys! Boys!
You are our children! What are you doing? What do you want?"

The Kremlin crowd cheered when a speaker read a statement by
President Bush saying the United States would not support the new Soviet
leadership, but one young man, facing a row of soldiers ringing the
square, remarked dejectedly: "That's it; that's the end of democracy."

In a direct challenge to the hard-line coup leaders, Yeltsin called
for a nationwide protest strike, declared that the Russian republic
would temporarily assume the functions of Soviet government agencies in
Russian territory and read an appeal to the Russian people urging "the
immediate return of Mikhail Sergeievich Gorbachev to his post."

"We have considered and still consider that such use of force is
unacceptable," the Associated Press quoted Yeltsin as saying. "It
discredits the Soviet Union before the whole world, undermines our
prestige in international society and returns us to the Cold War-era and
the isolation of the Soviet Union from world society."

Yeltsin termed the takeover a "state crime" and issued a decree
declaring that all resolutions passed by the new Emergency Committee
should be considered illegal and invalid and that Russian officials who
carried them out would be prosecuted.

"Yeltsin! Yeltsin!" the crowd chanted in unison. "Down with the
Communist Party."

Next to mount the tank was Soviet Environment Minister Nikolai
Vorontsov -- the first non-Communist appointed to the Soviet government
in seven decades -- who denounced the Emergency Committee's assumption
of power as "illegal," saying it was engineered clandestinely without a
meeting of the federal cabinet.

Vorontsov was followed by a beribboned lieutenant general, Konstantin
Kobiets, who introduced himself as head of the Russian parliament's
defense committee. "Just because these {Soviet} officers and generals
are wearing uniforms does not mean that the soldiers will support them,"
he told the crowd, insisting that troops are not obliged to obey unjust
orders.

Kobiets was cheered lustily, but some of his listeners reacted
skeptically. "What sort of a general is he, anyway?" muttered one
Yeltsin supporter. "He is a general without an army; they are not going
to listen to him."

Apart from a few Russian policemen barring access to the parliament
building with submachine guns, the government of the Russian republic
has no security force to defend it. Its mass media, including television
and radio stations and a number of newspapers, were confiscated by
Soviet officials early this morning, while most independent newspapers
also were closed down.

"We are defenseless," Russian Prime Minister Ivan Silayev told
reporters this morning. "We cannot be saved by tanks or submachine guns,
for we have neither. Only the support of the Russian people and the
support of Muscovites can save us."

But while the advantage of brute force is clearly on the side of the
military and Communist hard-liners, soldiers interviewed on the streets
of Moscow today showed little enthusiasm for their task, most of them
having been roused at provincial barracks without explanation in the
middle of the night and ordered to head for the capital.

Almost without exception, however, they said they would fulfill the
orders of Defense Minister Yazov. When asked if he was loyal to
Gorbachev as the supreme commander of the armed forces, one soldier
shrugged his shoulders: "Gorbachev, Yanayev, that's all above our heads.
We just do whatever our bosses tell us."

But a young officer commanding a tank outside the Russian parliament
building said he would move against the building if ordered to, but that
he would not "go against the people."

"Actually," the officer said, "I have my doubts about the government
that's taking over now," and he added that several other tank commanders
agreed with him.

Indeed, most army officers outside the parliament made no attempt to
prevent demonstrators from distributing copies of Yeltsin's call for a
nationwide protest strike to the soldiers, who seemed grateful for any
scrap of information about what was going on. One tank crew, asked by
Muscovite protesters whom they had come to protect, replied: "You . . .
the people," but they were not sure from whom.

Many soldiers displayed empty ammunition clips to demonstrate that
they meant no harm, and in several instances, armored vechicles backed
way from crowds of protesters rather than provoke a confrontation.

Yeltsin told reporters at the Russian parliament that he had been
prevented from reaching his Kremlin office this morning by Soviet
security forces. At first, the 60-year-old Russian leader seemed pale
and shaken by the unfolding events, but he quickly regained his
confidence, angrily denouncing the "putschists" and resorting to black
humor. "At least 50 tanks are on their way to this building," he said at
one point after hearing a whispered report from an aide. "Anybody who
wants to save himself can do so. We are continuing to work." Surrounded
by Russian republic officials and his own security men, the towering
white-haired Siberian politician then walked out of the building to pose
for pictures in front of the tanks. After shaking hands with one
bewildered tank crew, Yeltsin quipped to the crowd: "Apparently, they
are not going to shoot the Russian president just yet."

In fact, about a dozen tanks from an elite Soviet armored unit
apparently broke ranks with their comrades and defected to the
Yeltsin-led opposition, taking up defensive positions around the Russian
parliament building. The tanks, said to be part of the crack Taman
paratroop division stationed south of Moscow, were dug in around the
building last night, their turret guns pointed toward the Moscow River,
as hundreds of bonfires sprang up on the parliament grounds around them,
the Reuter news agency reported.

Nearby, radical-reform Russian legislators expressed sympathy for the
ousted Soviet president, along with anger at what they described as his
lack of political foresight. Former KGB general Oleg Kalugin, who was
stripped of his rank and honors last year after criticizing the Soviet
security services, said that Gorbachev was partly to blame for today's
events because he refused to dismiss conservative advisers.

"In any other country, anybody who accused the president of bringing
the country to the verge of catastrophe would have been kicked out, but
Gorbachev hesitated," Kalugin said. "By dodging around and maneuvering,
he lost control of the leadership and sealed his own fate."

As dusk fell, there were more than a few others who pronounced the
takeover predictable. But as news of the takeover spread with the
sunrise, politicians, diplomats and journalists alike were caught off
guard. All across the country, people were awakened by friends telling
them to turn on their radios and television sets. "What are you doing in
bed?" one Moscovite yelled into the phone after rousing a Western
reporter from a deep sleep. "The reactionaries have seized power. Misha
{Gorbachev} is finished."